Title: Armageddon Now (2)

Author: Cyclone

Feedback: Please be gentle.

Distribution: Gimme credit and a link.

Rating: Mechanized violence and harsh language.

Spoilers: Up to Chosen for BtVS. Anything goes for the other.

Disclaimer: Some of the characters depicted herein belong to Joss. The jury's still out on others. I'm just borrowing them for a while.

Summary: The Scooby Gang must endure an apocalypse they cannot stop.

Author's Note: Had an image pop into my head that wouldn't go away, and it revived this particular plot bunny.


"Stupid... lumbering... piece of shit tin can, MOVE!" Xander snarled as he heaved on the controls, trying to get his Tomahawk out of the way of twin particle beams, which creased the side of his destroid's right arm. With a moment's struggle, he brought that very arm around and fired a thirty-megajoule particle beam in response, holing the battlepod with ridiculous ease.

The Tomahawk may be slow and an older-model destroid, but it certainly wasn't lacking in firepower. Except, perhaps, in comparison to the Monster.

/Goliath Squadron, fall back for rearming and report to the Daedalus./

Xander blinked and stared at the comm display, "Th' hell? The Daedalus?" He flicked the comm transmit and said, "Say again, Control?"

/Rearm and report to the Daedalus./

Xander shook his head but complied. After a moment, he noticed where the experimental pinpoint barriers were focusing, and a realization struck him...

"...damn," he muttered. "That's actually crazy enough to work."

/Kindly keep your comments to yourself, Corporal Harris/ came Hayes's sharp voice.

Xander started and blushed, "Err, sorry, Commander." With that, he shut off his comm transmitter.


"Hey, squirt, how'd you do?" Xander asked, tousling Dawn's hair.

"Stop it!" she smacked his arm. "For your information, Corporal, I took down three battlepods."

"Better'n me," Xander grinned. "I only tagged two. Unless you wanna count the cruiser."

"You were in the Daedalus?" she blinked, surprise overriding her irritation at the nickname.

"Yup," he nodded. "C'mon, let's go find the gang and celebrate our still being alive."


"Celebrating," it turned out, translated closer to "suffering in silence" this time as Buffy started mothering the two and checking them for injuries like a pair of ten-year-olds.

"Will you cut it out, sis!"

Well, mostly in silence, anyway.

"Buffy," Xander said patiently, "the doctors cleared us. We're fine."

The Slayer's shoulders slumped, and she said, "I know, but... I worry about you two."

"Buff, you shouldn't worry about us," Xander said.

"Yeah, sis," Dawn piped up. "After all, we're here, we're alive, we're not hurt. It's when we're out there that we could get blown up or spaced or..." she trailed off at Xander's glare, "...I'm not helping, am I?"

Buffy twitched.

"C'mon," Willow said cheerfully, "we're here to celebrate. You guys got through your first combat mission okay, and statistically, that's when most pilots die."

Buffy twitched again.

"Uh, Willow?" Dawn said.

"Will?" Xander chimed in.

"What?" she asked, looking at them.

"Not helping," they said in tandem.

It was at this point that Giles returned, fully loaded. "Ah, I hope no one minds Chinese, but the White Dragon was open, and a loose girder fell on the pizza parlor."

He blinked at the twitching Buffy, the patience-worn Xander, the guilty-looking Dawn, and the blushing Willow.

And decided he really didn't want to know.

"Did you get any of those little spring rolls, Giles?" Willow asked.

"Um, no, Willow," he said, tucking a smaller bag behind his back, "I didn't."


That night, Xander dreamed.

About then.

--Flashback--

A small part of Xander's mind made a mental note that wrinkly-looking demons in robes were to be avoided.

The rest of him was more focused on avoiding the flaming wreckage falling from the sky. It was a bit more of an immediate concern than the wrinkly robed demons, but he was definitely going to keep an eye out for them.

CRASH!

Xander narrowly dove out of the way as a thirty-foot-tall humanoid robot crashed into the ground and dug a great furrow in the ground, and darkness claimed him.

--End Flashback--

Xander bolted upright. He hadn't dreamed about that time in years. It had been his first exposure to robotech warfare, and he'd been lucky to survive it, even if the battle had taken place a hundred feet from him.

A hundred feet from him straight up, that is.

Of course, now he knew that the wrinkly robed demon that had sent him there was rwasundi demon, known for temporal anomalies. The Troika -- may they rot in hell for all eternity... including Andrew -- had used one to try to pin Katrina's death on Buffy, way back when.

Reiya... the name drifted into his mind as he climbed out of be before he brutally shoved the memory aside and made his way to the head.

He had things to do.

But in the back of his mind, a face still lurked, a face with ice blue hair, blood red eyes, and alabaster skin.


Buffy was on the observation deck, leaning against the railing and watching the planes take off.

"Watching Dawnie take off with the CAP?"

She started and turned, "Uh, yeah, Xander. Um, 'cap'?"

The destroid pilot leaned against the railing next to her and nodded at the launching veritechs, "Combat Aerospace Patrol. It's so we don't get caught by surprise if they attack."

"Oh."

They stood there in silence for several minutes.

"So, what's wrong, Buffy?"

She started again and relented with a sigh, "I dunno. I guess... I guess now I know how mom felt when she found out about the whole Slayer thing."

"Whaddaya mean?"

Buffy turned and leaned back against the railing, casting her gaze across the observation deck, and said, "Dawn. You. I mean, you're going out there, and I... I can't help. I don't know the first thing about this kind of fight."

"Don't be so sure about that, Buff," Xander replied, turning and matching her position. "There isn't that much difference between what we do out there and what we did back home. It's still a holding action, trying to make sure as few of us die as possible."

"How did she do it?" Buffy asked, shaking her head. She nodded toward across observation deck, "How do they do it? How do they keep going when their loved ones are out there, and they can't do anything to help?"

Folding his arms, he said, "Well, I'd imagine they just take each day as it comes." He turned again to face outward and nodded out, "Besides, Buffy, look again."

She did and saw a trio of fighters flying by.

"We're not alone this time."


Third Lieutenant Dawn Summers -- her commission granted by virtue of her engineering degree -- rotated her Valkyrie as she reached the outer edge of her patrol zone and fired her thrusters, killing her momentum and sending her on a vector skirting the patrol zone's edge.

Her wingman -- a jovial man named Kyle Stewart who, for obvious reasons, went by the callsign "Green Lantern" -- banked his fighter in a much smoother -- if inefficient -- curve that sent it arcing along the border of their patrol zone. His flight path betrayed his previous experience flying in atmosphere.

She clicked on her comm system, "Skull Thirteen to Fourteen. You see anything?"

/Not a thing, Snow White. Place is emptier than my stomach./

Dawn merely nodded, glad that the Valkyrie's communication system included miniature portrait video feeds. It was spooky out here. Except for the muffled thrum of her fighter's engines several meters behind her and the faint whoosh of her cockpit's air circulation system, it was utterly silent.

Not that she wanted to hear anything out here. While outer space provided the ultimate soundproofing, the Valkyrie's sensors were tied into an array of hidden speakers surrounding the cockpit, and they would simulate the sounds she would hear if she were flying in atmosphere, allowing her to keep track of a pitched battle around her without having to keep looking at her sensor board.

With a quick tap to her yoke, she rolled her fighter around until its belly faced the SDF-1 and looked "up."

"It's beautiful out here," she murmured.

/No kidding on that, Snow White./

Her gaze swept in an arc around... and she hit her comm, "Heads up. Six ostriches incoming."

/Tally-ho/ Kyle replied as he pulled "up" toward them.

Even as she shifted to guardian mode and swung her veritech around, Dawn keyed her comm over to Flight Control's frequency and reported, "Skull Thirteen to Control. We've got six battlepods incoming and are moving to engage. Request assistance."

/Copy that, Skull Thirteen. Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four are en route. ETA, one minute./

That's gonna be a long minute, she thought grimly as the missile targeting bracket on her HUD jittered uncertainly around the lead battlepod as they closed at a frightening speed.

/Skull Fourteen, guns guns guns./

A stream of 55mm shells sprayed out from Dawn's port side toward the incoming battlepods, severing one of the lead battlepod's legs at the knee. It was too low.

Or so she had thought. The third battlepod exploded, a line of holes stitched across the lower half of its ovoid torso.

"Nice shooting, Lantern," she said with a grin. "Skull Thirteen, fox two," she announced as a Stiletto streaked out from her left outermost hardpoint and struck the first battlepod square in the sensor eye.

Now we're only outnumbered two to one, she thought as she kicked in her thrusters and converted to battloid mode, charging through the debris of the first battlepod.

Shifting to battloid, she twirled and fired her gun pod at the nearest battlepod as she flew past it, perforating the entry hatch.

An alarm blared, and she glanced down. Her eyes widened, and she yelled frantically over the comm, "Buddy spike! Buddy spike! Lantern, you've locked onto me!"

/Negative, negative! I'm on guns/

"Then who...?" she broke off as she fired her thrusters at full blast, hoping to break the lock. An explosion set off alarms all around her and sent her battloid somersaulting as she struggled to bring it back under control.

Starboard engine's gone. Port engine's locked on full thrust. I'm a sitting duck out here!


Author's Postscript:

And yes, the Robotech Defense Force DOES have a "third lieutenant" rank. It is specifically mentioned by on-screen Max Sterling in one episode.

OTOH, there's no evidence of callsigns or the brevity coded comm chatter, but it just seemed wrong to me to have pilots without callsigns, and I like the flavor the comm chatter provides.

The whole "sensor-sound" system is a nod to both reality and the presence of sounds in space in Robotech.